


ain’t seen the sun in too damn long

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Coping, Getting Together, Healing, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 15:43:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18552793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Thor is a god without a planet to rule, without a people to lead.Bucky is a soldier without a Captain to adore, without a war to fight.But the sun will shine again.





	ain’t seen the sun in too damn long

Thor is haunted by a shadow that lurks to his right. The shadow has been his companion since before space and dust and the-wrong-shade-of-blue skin but he’s never felt it as heavy against his shoulder as he does now, sitting under a foreign sun hiding behind clouds, basking in a warmth that doesn’t belong to him.

He shivers, but he’s not cold, and presses a hand against the glass eye that sees nothing. The looming shade crosses to his left side and then there’s metal pressing into his shoulder.

“Pretty view,” Bucky says in his quiet way.

It isn’t. They’re staring at a pile of metal and concrete and scraps of fabric. There’s a fire no one’s been able to put out yet, and smoke litters the sky and curls between the clouds.

“Very,” Thor answers.

Bucky is quiet, watching the city burn and Thor drops his hand from his face, closes his eyes, and leans into the cold-but-warming metal. “Very,” he repeats, quiet like Thor.

\--

Bucky isn’t his friend. He’s not, none of the avengers really are. He likes Bruce, and Tony. Peter amuses him and Carol terrifies him, but these people aren’t his friends. Not anymore. Sometimes he wonders if they ever were, and then he feels gross and wrong and just…

They’ve all lost someone. Most of them many someones.

Bucky gets it though. It’s as much a new world for him as it is Thor, even if the mountains are the same he ran through as a kid.  

He doesn’t push Thor, doesn’t try to include him. Thor can feel him watching though, and he’s never surprised when Bucky slips into his room well after the sun has gone to rest.

  
They’re quiet as they stare across the sheets. And not at all quiet as they wrestle for control, and so deathly silent when one of them finally enters the other, Thor sometimes wonders if he dreams it.

But then the sun breaks through the curtains he knows he shut, either sticky and sore or just sticky, and he thinks, _no dreams._

\--

They aren’t friends, and this place isn’t their home, but they’re both lonely and lost, and Thor thinks that’s enough.

Bucky moves like a ghost, but only ever at Thor’s left. “They could fix that,” Bucky says softly.

Thor snorts and presses his fingers to an elbow hinge that’s stuck. “Someone else could grease this better,” he answers.

Bucky shrugs and flexes his fingers, eyes glued to the rain streaking down his dirty window. Sometimes Thor is jealous of Bucky’s little hide away.

Despite the rats.

Mostly he just thinks about how lonely the soldier must be out here.

Bucky interrupts his thoughts by saying, “The rain finally quelled the fire.”

“The rain won’t let up,” Thor grumbles.

Bucky shifts away from him, hides in the shadow to the right and says, “I thought the god of thunder liked the rain?”

The skies crack around them as Thor storms out the door.

\--

He’s not hiding from Bucky. No more than Bucky hides from everyone in a stone cottage lost in the woods. But Thor is busy when the Winter Soldier shows up at the press conferences. And when Bucky stands beside him at _another fucking memorial_ Thor shuts his good eye and tilts his face up into the rain.

Tony sees it. He never says anything. Peter sees it. He tries to say something but Tony’s hand is tight on his shoulder as he leads him away and Thor really aughta thank him.

He hides in a room that smells like snow and sleeps beneath an emerald cape instead.

He also locks his door, and it’s not actually enough to keep anyone out physically, but the symbolism is hard to break.

\--

The planet is a cold one. Dust clogs the streets and the air and the atmosphere. It worries everyone, but Thor doesn’t need the graphs, charts, maps, _data_ , to know the winter will be decades, but the world won’t turn to ice.

Bucky watches the grey skies, and Thor thinks, _he doesn’t either_.

They’re both the wrong kind of familiar with eternal winters, and one doesn’t ever forget that kind of chill.

Thor forces himself to embrace the cold, to thrive while his skin bumps up. Bucky walks around in heavy blankets.

They huddle together in beds too small and lick the sweat that pools at the base of their spines and they watch the snow pelt the window through curtains they both meant to shut.

\--

“He said they sun would shine on us again,” Thor finally admits.

“Asgard, or _you_?” Bucky asks. But he’s hiding to Thor’s right, shrouded in eternal shadow, and Thor can’t tell if he really wants to know. He shifts beneath the Winter Soldier, digs his fingers into his pillow, and doesn’t answer, even as Bucky bites the question into his lower back.

Bucky collapses against him later, his ear pressed against Thor’s navel. His hair is dark against Thor’s stomach, sweat damped and a little curled. In the shadow of the early morning, Thor can almost pretend it’s someone else’s breath damping the dark curls of his belly.

He’s a little surprised to find he doesn’t really want to, especially as cold, metal fingers curl over his hips, and a deep snore cracks the air.

Thor gently untangles the long hair, smoothes the lines on on a mouth that’s thin even in sleep.

“What did he promise you?” Thor asks the sleeping man.

\--

Winter last forever in the fade of the dust, and Thor moves through a sepia draped world sluggish, exhausted.

It’s hard to move quickly when half the world is an empty black hole.

He watches Bucky pick through fruit-rot and dirty cotton and thinks, _it’s just as hard when half your body is numb._

He can’t stay warm these days. It’s weird. He’s never really been this cold before, even when weighed into the snow by a man with ice for skin.

Bucky’s always cold, and it never bothers him. “I was born, reborn from the ice. I am made of ice,” he kisses against Thor’s jaw.

It makes sense. Thor’s always been attracted to the winter born.

\--

It takes almost two decades for the world to warm up again. But the sun still hides behind clouds and grey.

Bucky cuts his hair off, and Thor grows his back out. They learn how to compensate for each other. Bucky becomes a bright light to Thor’s right, and Thor keeps Bucky’s left warm and human.

There’s grey in the soldier’s beard; grey in the god’s temples.

There’s lines around their eyes and a shadow in their hearts.

Tony says it’s the whole world. That it’ll take a long time for the world to feel light again, despite her gaping hole, the empty wound she carries.

Bucky agrees, but Thor doesn’t feel heavy. He feels…

He feels fucking cold and stiff and he’s exhausted by it.

Bucky agrees with that too, so he lets Thor weigh him to the bed, lets him dig his fingers into his hips, lets the god bend him all wrong.

Thor smooths the plates of his shoulder later, and Bucky braids the blond hair into a crown that weighs like death.

_\--_

_With ya til the end of the line…_

The static sound clip plays on repeat. Tony gave it to Thor.

Someone was finally archiving all of the S.H.I.E.L.D. intelligence, including the com communications.

“I didn’t know we recorded those conversations,” Thor says stiffly.

Tony glares. “There’s a lot of secrets I never wanted to learn.”

“Wakanda?” Thor asks.

Tony shakes his head. “After. According to the records that static screech at the end is…”

Thor grips the device in his hand, and he’s shivering but it’s not because he’s cold. “Has James heard this yet?”

Tony shakes his head. “Figured I’d leave it up to you, if he ever does.”

Thor thinks, _no it shouldn’t be up to me_ , because he doesn’t want to see the devastation on Bucky’s face.

“You love him enough to know he deserves this,” Tony leaves him with.

\--

Thor is a god without a planet to rule, without a people to lead.

Bucky is a soldier without a Captain to adore, without a war to fight.

Thor hates himself when he hands over the recording. Bucky looks at it, confused. “When you fell, he said something to you, and you couldn’t hear over the noise and the screams and the bullets. But he said something, and you deserve to have….”

Well, it’s not a goodbye. It’s not closure. But it’s something. Bucky closes his metal hand over the device. “I know what he said, Thor. It’s what we always said.”

“Did you say it back?” Thor asks quiet. He needs to know.

He needs to know if Bucky was as cruel as he was, when he crowed, _you really are the worst brother._

He needs to know one of them had a better goodbye. Bucky shrugs. “There wasn’t time.”

Thor doesn’t ask what Bucky’s last words were, but Bucky tells him, “I don’t remember. I thought there’d be another conversation.”

Bucky doesn’t come into his room later, and Thor thinks its been so long since he slept on his own, it’s unfamiliar.

He vows not to get used to it ever again as he pads down a dirty row under a pink sky, and barrels through the oak door of a stone cottage.

\--

Twenty-six years after everything, Thor wakes up to a blinding light, to heat against his right cheek. He turns, weighed down by a flesh-and-bone arm, and stares at a blue he’d almost forgotten.

He wakes Bucky, digs his fingers into a soft belly until electricity dances over pale skin.

“Come with me,” he whispers. Together they sneak through the woods to a stream bubbling over rock and metal. To a small, forgotten clearing dusted with dandelions and calla lilies that should long have died away.

They sit, faces tilted up and shoulders pressed together, basking in a warmth that is almost too much.

“He was right,” Bucky whispers.

It hurts. Thor thinks it always might. “He wasn’t wrong,” he tells Bucky, tangling their fingers together.

The sun is bright, warm, and within minutes they’re sweating in a way that sitting hasn’t caused in over two decades and Thor sighs. Bucky smiles against his arm, and tells him, “I ain’t seen the sun in too damn long.”

Thor kisses him, licks the salt above his lip and says, “Just don’t let it burn you.”

—

”It’s a pretty view,” Bucky tells him hours later when the sky is orange and pink and purple and blue and fading. 

 “Yeah,” Thor says, because this time it really is.

And it hurts a little, the shadow at his right. Hurts that Loki isn’t here. He can see Bucky’s metal fist clenching in the dirt and the knows the soldier gets it too. “A damn beautiful sight,” Thor tells him. “But let’s go home, there will be others to enjoy.”


End file.
